This proposal requests partial support for a Gordon Research Conference on The Microbial Stress Response to be held from July 11 to July 16, 2004 at Mt. Holyoke College. This extraordinarily successful meeting is the only one that broadly considers all manifestations of stress in prokaryotic organisms, including specific stress responses, development and pathogenesis. The meeting also considers relevant stress responses in eukaryotic microbes. The strength of this meeting is that it brings together cutting edge research from related but often non-intersecting fields to allow cross-fertilization of ideas. The proposed sessions for the meeting are: I--Oxidant stresses, II--The Host pathogen interaction; III--Prokaryotic development; IV--Small RNAs in sensing and regulating stress; V--Proteolysis in stress and development; Vl--Computational and genomic approaches to signaling; VII--Microbial ecology/diversity; VIII--Signal transduction pathways in stress responsive gene expression; IX--Sensing growth stages. The current meeting includes a sizeable discussion of metals in stress responses and features an expanded emphasis on genomic analysis and modeling. By bringing together computational scientists with experimentalists, we expect to nucleate future collaborations in this expanding area. As one indicator of the prestige of this meeting, we note that session chairs include many of the major figures in prokaryotic biology. Each session will have several invited speakers and some speakers chosen from the abstracts. Our speakers this year include women, minorities and new faculty. Participants generally include: new and established faculty mostly at major research institutions, but with a sizeable representation of those from small liberal arts colleges, scientists in industry, postdoctoral fellows, and students. This meeting is generally oversubscribed and given the current program is likely to have very wide appeal. [unreadable] [unreadable]